Salesforce just announced that they have passed 3 million app installs from the AppExchange, the world’s largest marketplace of business applications. Congratulations – an impressive milestone! No other company in the world – SaaS, Cloud, or otherwise – has had such a profound impact on the way the world does business; delivering cloud-based solutions that
Customer Success is the new trend worldwide and many SaaS and non-SaaS companies are now discovering the challenge of global expansion. This is brand new territory for most businesses, with very little guidance and expertise available. I have been working for many years now successfully building and developing Customer Success teams across Europe and I
Customer success managers and leaders: Do any of these statements sound familiar to you? “The customer was upset during our kick-off because we asked them the same questions that the sales team had asked them before close.” “I’m not sure what Services actually implemented for this customer.” “No one scheduled the kick-off meeting yet; I
Everyone in the Customer Success world is primarily focused on – in one form or another – monitoring and managing Customer Health. This is the one that everybody is talking about and thinking about. Everyone understands how important this is. And there’s a lot of information about customers that can help you understand and manage
In the Customer Success world, the idea of handing-off a customer from one group to another is a big deal. Whether it’s from Sales to Onboarding or Onboarding to Customer Success, these handoffs can make or break the customer’s experience with you. I’ve even written about the less-often-discussed nailing of handoffs between Customer Success Managers (CSMs)
Customer Success is not just an organization, but is really a philosophy and requires the whole company to be behind it. If that isn’t true, then the odds of being successful at this are pretty small because like most organizations, Customer Success does not live on an island. Retention truly depends on every part of
I get asked all the time how you will know if your Customer Success initiative is, well, successful. First, you have to focus on your customers and remember that they have a desired outcome. Solve for that and know what it takes to get them there. Measure and monitor to ensure they’re successful along the way;
For many companies, implementing “customer success” processes and capabilities is a relatively new concept. SaaS companies have been the early adopters of institutionalizing customer success as a core function – Customer Success Managers at SaaS companies are focused day-to-day on driving renewals, increasing up-sell and cross-sell revenue, and managing their customers more proactively and efficiently.
I’m often asked what the best ways are to test whether you are satisfying customers, but I think those questions are actually misaligned with what we really should be focusing on. Before I go on, I have to say that I still say things like “make the customer happy” (even though I wrote this article) and “improve
One of my favorite Customer Success sayings is: “Not only is the customer not always right, they’re almost always wrong.” When Dan Steinman, Chief Customer Officer here at Gainsight, came up with that saying, he did so to be provocative and to make a point. Now, to bring it back around and put everyone at ease,